Nine Princes Nowhere to Be Found

I am croggled to discover that Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber is apparently not available as an ebook (not commercially, anyway — my library seems to only have it in electronic format). Furthermore, if I wish to purchase the dead tree edition new, my only option seems to be buying an enormous honkin’ omnibus of all ten main novels.

I would welcome evidence that I am wrong about this, likely on account of searching when it is nearly 3 a.m. here and I need sleep. But if it is indeed as it appears: what the heck? Why has the rights-holder not made the book more widely available? This is not some obscure novel nobody’s ever heard of except academics and three Yuletide fans; it’s a reasonably well-known classic. I want to give the rights-holder money, whoever they are. But they are making it annoying to do so. I don’t want a giant omnibus; I want the instant gratification of an ebook, which I can take with me to Wiscon, and then if I like the first one I’ll probably buy it and the rest in paper. I do not want to carry a brick on the plane.

Grrr. Argh.

hilarity

My most recent gem of WordPress spam:

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems
as though you relied on the video to make your point. You obviously know what
youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something informative to read?

Indeed. My problem is that I don’t write enough — I’m just throwing my intelligence away.

A Year in Pictures – Limpets

Limpets
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One of the effects from me becoming more interested in photography is, I’ve begun to appreciate details. Point Lobos is a very pretty area in Monterey, and I took many scene-sized pictures there . . . but I also found myself pausing to shoot things like this little line of limpets, clinging to a rock on the shore. A few years ago, I suspect I never would have even noticed them, much less taken this picture.

speaking of Ree . . . .

Possibly the easiest way for me to encapsulate the character I talked about in a previous post is by linking you to this song.

It’s an amazing remix all on its own. I love the way it builds, wave-like: it keeps climbing and then receding, stepping back to a quieter level when you expect it to bust out in full Linkin Park screamo yelling. 😛 But more than that, it fit beautifully with Ree at the pivotal moment of her story, the brink of her metamorphosis from the broken, lost thing she had been for eons back to her original self. “I’ve felt this way before” . . . she’d been shattered, and had tried to piece herself back together — thought she had succeeded — but then during the course of the game she was shattered again, falling back to square one, so far from her goal it was almost impossible for her to believe that she was actually closer to it than ever. “Against my will I stand beside my own reflection” . . . she sold half her soul to someone else, not realizing that was what she was doing, and she had to reclaim it. “Without a sense of confidence, I’m convinced that there’s just too much pressure to take” . . . the problem with her Seelie side was that it had too much confidence, without the fatalism of her Unseelie half to temper it, which is how she got broken again, and then the symbolism of the diamond and pressure over time pretty much guaranteed I had to use this song. This was Ree at her lowest point, one step away from victory, and the tension that builds throughout this evokes those days perfectly in my mind. There’s more to it than one song, but I can point to the song and say, this. This is why I can’t forget her story.

When I make soundtracks for characters, or for games I run, or for novels, many of the songs are filler. They go in because I want the whole story in music, and so I pick the best matches I can; in the really good soundtracks, even the filler is pretty solid. But this? This is why I go to the effort. For the one or two or five songs that are the story, the ones that become so linked with the narrative that they end up feeding back into it, and it can be eight years later and hearing them still brings the story to life in my head. This is Galen walking into the chamber below the Monument. This is Dead Rick getting his memories back. Here’s the entire second half of Doppelganger, according to my half-dozing brain when I was in the middle of writing the book; I can quite literally map segments of the novel to the various stages in the music, because my subconscious had decided this was the outline it was writing to. (Much like what happened here, though that was on a smaller scale.)

It’s no accident that I also love film scores. Pairing music with story — turning music into story — is one of my favorite things. Since I’m not a composer, I have to settle for the mix-tape approach. Sometimes it works out very, very well.

A Year in Pictures – Halebidu Frieze

Halebidu Frieze
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Indian temples are very frustrating things to photograph, because the decoration on them isn’t done in discrete blocks: it’s an ongoing mass of things, friezes like this one banding the exterior, sculptures rubbing shoulders with elaborately carved columns — basically no square foot left plain. I suspect this frieze depicts military glory, since there appears to be someone crouching beneath the hooves of that horse, but as you can see the top edge has rather been damaged.

Tour report, and one day to go!

Design Your Own Dragon ends tomorrow night! Get your entry in while the getting is good . . . .

Me, I’m home from tour. The fact that I am exceedingly glad to be back has more to do with the wear and tear of shifting from hotel to airport to cab to store than to do with the tour events themselves, which were splendid. Mary Robinette Kowal and I drew some pretty good crowds together, and it turns out we make for compatible traveling companions — which was by no means a guarantee! We’d met a couple of times before, at conventions and such, and of course our books make a good pairing with each other . . . but that didn’t necessarily mean we’d get along on the road. Despite Mary having her own hashtag for travel woes, I quite liked traveling with her. It turns out we see eye-to-eye on a number of fronts, ranging from fiction to how early we should get to the airport, and that’s valuable when you’re spending a week and a half together and suffering the aforementioned wear and tear.

Plus! There were costumes! And dragon bones!

I foolishly did not get anyone to take photos on my own phone, so rather than stealing other people’s pictures, I will link you to them. This report at A Truant Disposition shows the whole thing pretty well, from my dress and Mary’s to our respective song-and-dance bit (a mini puppet show on her part, a mini naturalist lecture on mine). Geeky Library has some more, and I quite like this photo from @ghostwritingcow on Twitter. The “dragon bones” are the thing I alluded to before the tour: Mary suggested I obtain replica dinosaur fossils from Skulls Unlimited, and use them as dragon substitutes. For the curious, the skull and the smaller claw are from a velociraptor, while the tooth is from a T-Rex and the larger claw is from a megaraptor. (The tiny skull, which I don’t think got photographed, is actually supposed to be a “dragon skull;” Mary picked it up at a natural history museum in Utah.)

Touring is a lot more fun in company, I have to say. Not only does it jazz up the event itself, by giving you somebody to riff off of, it does a lot to mitigate the “oh god I’m in another airport” drudgery of the travel itself. So props to Tor for putting us together, and I hope for a chance to do something like this again in the future.

A Year in Pictures – Polish Church Interior

Polish Church Interior
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I don’t actually know the name of this church, which is a pity. It’s somewhere in Zakopane, or at least that general region; we weren’t able to go in, so this photo is taken through a window in the door. The woodworking is absolutely gorgeous, and I love the warmth it creates.

A Year in Pictures – Sainte-Chapelle Relief

Sainte-Chapelle Relief
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I rather suspect this relief decoration is new, because it is not nearly weathered enough to have been there for more than maybe a hundred years or so. But I imagine it’s intended to be the type of carving that might have adorned the place in the past; given how much care they’re taking with restoring the building, it may even be a direct reproduction. It was next to the entrance, and I thought it was quite cool; then I walked inside and discovered it was only a tiny, greyscale taste of the glory within. 😀

Four more days to Design Your Own Dragon

We’re headed into the final stretch for Design Your Own Dragon, and I just wanted to clarify something one interested party asked about a few days ago:

You do get to keep the rights to your entry.

Which is to say, if I pick your dragon as a winner, I will have the non-exclusive right to use the concept (with modifications, if necessary) in the Memoirs of Lady Trent, in prose and/or visual form — but you retain all other rights. If you want to write own stories or make your own art about your dragon concept, you are entirely free to do so. You are not signing over your idea to me wholesale.

This was a question for at least one interested party, which means it may very well be a question for others as well. So if that was giving you any hesitation in entering, hopefully this clears things up in an acceptable fashion.

You’ve got until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on May 15th. I’ve got a lot of fun entries already, but there’s always room for more!

A Year in Pictures – River Bones

River Bones
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Apparently you can take the archaeologist out of the field, but you can’t take the field out of the archaeologist. While wandering down to the short of the Thames near Tower Bridge, I discovered several bones amidst the gravel: a vertebra or two, bits of some long bones I couldn’t ID. I have no idea what they were from, though (because I am the sort of person I am) it did cross my mind that they were of vaguely the right size to be human. Anyway, although I rarely “stage” my shots, in this case I piled the bones up in an artistic manner and took this photo. Like you do.

One more week for dragons! Also, an interview/giveaway.

Interview first: I’m over at Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, talking about a whole host of stuff, ranging from The Tropic of Serpents to my essay on epic story structure to making up slang to about a dozen other things. Check out the link for a giveaway, too — either a copy of The Tropic of Serpents or a set of both books.

As for the contest, this is your one-week reminder; the deadline is coming up on May 15th. If you’d like to see your own dragon concept show up in the Memoirs of Lady Trent — not to mention read Voyage of the Basilisk before it comes out! — check out the guidelines and send in your entry!

A Year in Pictures – Torii Detail

Torii Detail
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I posted a shot of Fushimi Inari before, showing one of the galleries of torii arches. This is a detail shot from another arch further on — a fairly recent addition, judging by the glossiness of the paint. You can see the ends of another behind it, giving you another sense of just how closely packed they can get.

If memory serves, by the way, this shot is also the one that inspired this post while I was in Japan. Being able to control your camera is nice.

A Year in Pictures – Notre-Dame Across the Seine

Notre-Dame Across the Seine
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I got several good photos of Notre Dame the night we wandered around staying up way too late — well, as good as I could get with an old Leica and no tripod — but the framing of this one is hands-down my favorite. Finding a suitable gap between the wooden kiosks that line the bank of the Seine wasn’t easy, though!

A Year in Pictures – Round Table

Round Table
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I have no idea why there’s a building named for King Arthur in Gdańsk. Artus Court was apparently a big social center for merchants back in the city’s medieval and Renaissance heyday; nowadays it’s a museum, and one of the upstairs rooms is dedicated to vaguely Arthurian stuff (read: weapons, armor, and tents a la a medieval tournament), complete with this Round Table. (With, um, a Tudor rose in the middle. Go figure.)

A funny thing happened during Mary’s reading . . .

The Book Bin in Salem, OR (where today’s event was held) has a lovely orange tabby cat named Rose Weasley. Naturally I made her acquaintance when I arrived, both while I was still in street clothes, and then again after getting into costume.

I did my bit — reading, passing around “dragon bones” — and then Mary got up to read. About two thirds of the way through her piece, Rose comes wandering by my chair. I offer her a few discreet pats, not wanting to distract anybody from Mary’s reading, and Rose sniffs inquisitively at the skirt and train of my dress. And then she decides to investigate this fascinating new cave she found.

Which is to say, she wanders under my skirts.

I’m sitting there attempting to keep a straight face — remember, Mary’s still reading; she doesn’t need me making a spectacle of myself behind her — while these odd little tugging sensations ripple through my petticoat, as Rose sniffs at things/steps on them/god knows what she was doing under there. Not attacking, I think, for which I am very grateful; there’s lots of dangling fabric that could easily have been interpreted as a cat toy. Off to my left, one of the store employees has seen the whole thing and is trying not to crack up. I manage to hold it together until Mary finishes, whereupon I share these fascinating developments with our audience, and ask whether Mary needs me to move out of the way of her puppet show. Fortunately her answer is “no,” because I’m kind of afraid that if I try to raise my skirts to evict the cat, she will decide my costume is her new toy. She seems happy to be settled against my left ankle for a time, and wanders out again before the puppet show is done.

If you someday read a book or story of mine in which a very proper Victorian lady has to maintain her composure because she cannot possibly tell the other people in the scene that a cat has gone spelunking under her dress, now you’ll know why.

I’d say “you can’t make this stuff up,” but apparently you can

So there’s this game called Crusader Kings II, which is a strategy game in which you play a medieval European dynasty — yes, you read that right, a dynasty. At any given time your “character” is the king of that dynasty, but when he kicks the bucket you switch over to playing his heir and so on. (Or her. But getting female inheritance going is near impossible if you aren’t Basque, and playing as Basque is near impossible all on its own. So.)

It’s quite well-designed; the people behind it seem to have a decent grasp of how medieval politics actually worked. You can’t go to war unless you have a casus belli, so no invading your neighbor without at least a fig leaf of justification. You spend half your time marrying off your unattached relatives, so that you’ll have allies when you do fight a war and three generations down the road your heir might inherit the crowns of four kingdoms. Etc. And after a while they started releasing expansions for non-Christian or non-kingdom options: The Old Gods for European paganism, Sword of Islam for the Middle East, The Republic so you can play as Venice or some place like that, Sons of Abraham for Judaism, Rajas of India for the subcontinent, etc. I haven’t played those personally, nor do I know all of the cultures in question well enough to judge quality, but I get the impression they continue to do a decent job of modeling historical dynamics in a realistic fashion — within, of course, the abstracted framework of a political/military strategy game.

. . . a mostly realistic fashion, that is. Because one of the DLCs is Sunset Invasion, in which the Aztecs invade Europe during the 13th century. Y’know. Like they did.

I thought, okay. The people making this game are obviously geeks, and geeks come up with these wild, over-the-top ideas. They’ve gotten it out of their system now.

Friends, I was wrong.

I was so very, very wrong.

You guys. I wrote a CKII fic for Yuletide this past year. I made it as crazy as I could, based on my experiences with the game and some advice from my husband, but I’m well aware that it fell short of the full craziness CKII can produce. But even had I hit my mark . . . it would have been nothing compared to that tale above. All hail Sebdann, spawn of Satan and Queen of Milesia!